Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Monday August 31, 2009 @01:28PM
from the he-slimed-me dept.

Canis Lupus writes to mention that researchers from the University of West England are designing the world's first biological robot, constructed from mold. The robot, "Plasmobot," will be created using vegetative slime mold called plasmodium (Physarum polycephalum) that is commonly found in forests, gardens, and most damp places in the UK. "This new plasmodium robot, called plasmobot, will sense objects, span them in the shortest and best way possible, and transport tiny objects along pre-programmed directions. The robots will have parallel inputs and outputs, a network of sensors and the number crunching power of super computers. The plasmobot will be controlled by spatial gradients of light, electro-magnetic fields and the characteristics of the substrate on which it is placed. It will be a fully controllable and programmable amorphous intelligent robot with an embedded massively parallel computer."

"...number crunching power of super computers... It will be a fully controllable and programmable amorphous intelligent robot with an embedded massively parallel computer."
I don't think that means what you think it means...

It propagates and searches for sources of nutrients and when it finds such sources it branches out in a series of veins of protoplasm. The plasmodium is capable of solving complex computational tasks, such as the shortest path between points and other logical calculations

I don't know about you, but we've tried our own implementation of this phenomenon in our office fridge, and haven't gotten any good computational output. Sure, the General Tso's Chicken came up with a fairly solid quicksort implementation, but that Greenish Liquid That May or May Not Have Been a Salad At One Time still hasn't figured out basic pointer arithmetic, much less decent memory management.

This mould, or plasmodium, is a naturally occurring substance with its own embedded intelligence. It propagates and searches for sources of nutrients and when it finds such sources it branches out in a series of veins of protoplasm.

Nope, normal molds are fungi. Slime molds aren't molds at all. They used to be considered in the now-defunct Protist kingdom, but that's not a monophyletic grouping, so it's been split up into several different kingdoms (although the exact classification is still the subject of some debate).

The most popular current taxonomy puts slime molds into several kingdoms, with plasmodial slime molds (the case at hand) in the kingdom Amoebozoa alongside amoebas (among others)

And what exactly do they intend to use it for? Does this have any practical applications where it would be superior to an inorganic robot that isn't at risk of being eaten by the first moderately complex organism that thinks mold looks tasty?

You're sitting in a bar. The vid screen is barely audible over the sounds of the loud patrons hammering back their brews and celebrating the end of the day and beginning of the night. With some effort, you tune your cybernetic hearing enhancement to hear the newscaster.

"Hackers used banned mould robots to conquer cheese factories in Wisconsin and France. News at Eleven.

Looking down, the plate of nachos you ordered suddenly doesn't look so appealing. It looks less appealing as it leaps up from the

Man, if there's ever a situation where I'd be okay with the GM assuming I'm caught off guard, it's when my own plate of nachos leaps up and attacks my face. The only way I could be more surprised would be if the Long Island Ice Tea I bought tried to sober me up.

Nice and simple answer to that FTA: "Researchers have received a Leverhulme Trust grant worth £228,000 to develop
the amorphous non-silicon biological robot".

At the risk of getting modded "redundant", this really doesn't sound like much of a "discovery",
much less a "robot". At best, IF they came up with a novel way to arrange food around it
to solve NP-complete problems, you could call it a type of massively parallel processor. Possibly,
with a rea

The article explains what's meant by saying that the "robot" will compute: "Most people's idea of a computer is a piece of hardware with software designed to carry out specific tasks. This mould, or plasmodium, is a naturally occurring substance with its own embedded intelligence. It propagates and searches for sources of nutrients and when it finds such sources it branches out in a series of veins of protoplasm. The plasmodium is capable of solving complex computational tasks, such as the shortest path between points and other logical calculations. Through previous experiments we have already demonstrated the ability of this mould to transport objects. By feeding it oat flakes, it grows tubes which oscillate and make it move in a certain direction carrying objects with it. We can also use light or chemical stimuli to make it grow in a certain direction."

That's like saying that the bamboo plant on my desk is a robot. It, too, transports substances in a direction determined by light input, and computes the optimal direction for approaching a light source. I could even claim that I'm adding "logic gates" to it by covering or pruning certain leaves.

Says the article, the mold robot has "the number crunching power of super computers" because it carries out computing tasks. That claim is also pretty silly. The A* algorithm can find the shortest distance between paths, and it doesn't require anything that could be called a supercomputer today.

So, this thing is a "robot" in the sense that pointing at random objects and calling yourself a master of "found art" is art.

Exactly. In fact, plasmodium does not compute optimal distances, it has no senses to detect objects at a distance. It detects chemical concentration gradients and moves to or from higher concentrations of chemicals it likes or dislikes. It does not compute. In fact, if you've ever seen one move, it wriggles around a lot. It has to, in order to detect its immediate environment.

While I agree that it follows concentration gradients... one could say the same thing about your own nervous system. Then we get back to "what exactly do we mean by intelligence?"

From the abstract:

"The plasmodium of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum is a large amoeba-like cell consisting of a dendritic network of tube-like structures (pseudopodia). It changes its shape as it crawls over a plain agar gel and, if food is placed at two differen

It's that time of year - University Clearing, all the minor universities in the UK are trying to get their names in the media so that potential students who didn't get into a major university may pick them instead of a gap year.

The article explains what's meant by saying that the "robot" will compute..."So, this thing is a "robot" in the sense that pointing at random objects and calling yourself a master of "found art" is art.

The real test is whether the entire AI can be implemented in a single Twitter.

Now see, it's that bit, the bit about it being fully controllable that makes me nervous. Why did they feel the need to put that bit in. Slimy mold; intelligent, massively parallel processing robot... fully controllable, yes but by whom and for how long.

All is well and good until it develops AI and we bow before it. I figured technology would get us eventually but, and I must admit, yielding to our new mold masters was not what I had in mind.
You will become one with the slime!!!

I went looking for negative stuff, knowing plasmodiums were behind malaria. Couldn't find any for this stuff, but I did find some juicy bits from biomedical science regarding its computational ability, or rather its internal processes that can be used as such. Not many will be able to get the referenced material, but just the abstracts are tasty.

The plasmodium behind malaria is not the same kind of plasmodium. IIRC, malaria is caused by a sporozoan, which is completely different from a slime mould. In fact, plasmodium is not even a kind of slime mould. In reference to slime moulds, plasmodium is just the macroscopic form of any slime mould.

Yeah, the reason slime molds are referred to as plasmodium is because the slime mold colony lacks defined cell walls or membranes between what would normally be considered individual cells. The mold can essentially be thought of as a single cell with many nuclei, since cytoplasm is continous throughout the entire colony. As the parent notes, this type of structure (a lifecycle stage, really) has nothing to do with the protozoa which cause malaria, which just happen to be of genus Plasmodium.

In reference to slime moulds, plasmodium is just the macroscopic form of any slime mould.

Not _any_ slime mold. Plasmodial slime molds are one small grouping of slime molds.

Dictyostelids, for instance, are unicellular slime molds. Plasmodiums have many (often millions) nuclei in one cell membrane. Dictyostelids maintain cellular structure--their macroscopic form is not a plasmodium, though they do form a "pseudoplasmodium" that kind of looks like a plasmodium.

"It might also be possible for thousands of tiny computers made of plasmodia to live on our skin and carry out routine tasks freeing up our brain for other things." - In the future we will all be covered in slime, is this human evolution? A time may come when bathing goes out of style in order to accumulate more processing power..

"It might also be possible for thousands of tiny computers made of plasmodia to live on our skin and carry out routine tasks freeing up our brain for other things." - In the future we will all be covered in slime, is this human evolution? A time may come when bathing goes out of style in order to accumulate more processing power..

And they call me a disgusting slob for not bathing. I am just way ahead of my time.

By placing a wire cage around my tomato plant I can alter the direction that the plant grows in making it capable of determining the fast route to the sun and moving small objects of my desire. The plant is able to grow, and can even transform carbon dioxide into oxygen!
I call it tomatobot and I expect the government to give me a $500k grant to work on further development.

and see if this will happen:
from TFA: "It might also be possible for thousands of tiny computers made of plasmodia to live on our skin and carry out routine tasks freeing up our brain for other things." Enter the reign of the moldborgs.